Any thoughts on Drobo SANs?

I am toying with the idea of buying an entry level SAN and I ran across the Drobo B1200I. It looks interesting. I know the past Drobo stuff has been known for terrible performance. Is that still true?

How is their support and reliability?

What other products should I look at in the roughly $10,000-15,000 price range? $15k would be the upper limit of what I could even consider at this time.

My IOPS needs are modest. I don't have a number. I mainly need a lot of capacity (at least 10 TB, 20-30 would be ideal) with easy expansion, which is what attracted me to the Drobo SANs. I can get one configured for 36 TB capacity for just under 15k. The ability to just replace drives with larger ones and easily expand total storage capacity is very attractive.

I'm not too serious at this point, and I will probably just dramatically expand the DAS I have now or roll my own iSCSI storage with Windows Server 2012. But I want to research as much as I can before I dismiss buying a commercial SAN.

I am currently running mostly DAS but I do have a home-built SAN in use right now. I already have a dedicated iSCSI switch and some nice Intel 4 port NICs in a couple of servers that I am using for iSCSI. I am debating between jumping in all the way with a commercial SAN, building a better DIY SAN, or moving to 100% DAS.

$15k should easily get you a dual controller MD3200/P2000 unit with 12x3TB drives(16.7-27.9TB base2 usable depending on how much redundancy you want). Expansion with in place drives isn't quite as easy as with a Drobo or similar Home/SMB arrays, you'd likely instead just get additional shelves instead.

I can't say much about Drobo's, but I will say to stay away from the HP P2000 series. At best they are awful and unreliable.

Have you looked into QNAP? They make great backup devices, and front end as well. Like the Drobo, I think you need to know the modest performance and support that you would get from any device in this class.

I can't say much about Drobo's, but I will say to stay away from the HP P2000 series. At best they are awful and unreliable.

Have you looked into QNAP? They make great backup devices, and front end as well. Like the Drobo, I think you need to know the modest performance and support that you would get from any device in this class.

Err, what? The P2000 is far from unreliable, ours has taken all sorts of abuse including a clueless newbie tech who didn't following direction or his standing instructions. He pulled a pair of SAS cables with the unit up, we were lucky we had things laid out in RAID10 with the stripe sets split between shelves, but even in that extreme situation the controllers just kept ticking and after the cables were put back we were able to restripe to recover redundancy.

I can't say much about Drobo's, but I will say to stay away from the HP P2000 series. At best they are awful and unreliable.

Have you looked into QNAP? They make great backup devices, and front end as well. Like the Drobo, I think you need to know the modest performance and support that you would get from any device in this class.

Err, what? The P2000 is far from unreliable, ours has taken all sorts of abuse including a clueless newbie tech who didn't following direction or his standing instructions. He pulled a pair of SAS cables with the unit up, we were lucky we had things laid out in RAID10 with the stripe sets split between shelves, but even in that extreme situation the controllers just kept ticking and after the cables were put back we were able to restripe to recover redundancy.

We deployed 4 to different customers, plus our own unit in house. All but 1 have had catastrophic failures of one type or another. Working with their support, two had software errors where the only recourse was to evacuate the SAN and recreate the vdisk (or on one we could just ignore multiple disk failure notifications every time a scrub ran, after replacing half of the array that got old). One had a firmware update (1 revision difference) corrupt all data on all vdisks. Another would see a single disk failure in a RAID 5 as a reason to drop the entire array out, twice. One averages a disk failure a month. I can not see us ever getting another one.

The ability to dynamically and simply expand available space was Drobo's initial selling point. It was their main point of being. When Drobo was first announced I wanted one. But the $$$ was to much for home use at the time. It didn't happen.

But now I'd expect every NAS / SAN to dynamically expand their array.

Drobo's performance was always underwhelming.

As of now, I'd look elsewhere. Unless Drobo will give you a loaner and you find it is fast enough for you.

I can't say much about Drobo's, but I will say to stay away from the HP P2000 series. At best they are awful and unreliable.

Have you looked into QNAP? They make great backup devices, and front end as well. Like the Drobo, I think you need to know the modest performance and support that you would get from any device in this class.

Err, what? The P2000 is far from unreliable, ours has taken all sorts of abuse including a clueless newbie tech who didn't following direction or his standing instructions. He pulled a pair of SAS cables with the unit up, we were lucky we had things laid out in RAID10 with the stripe sets split between shelves, but even in that extreme situation the controllers just kept ticking and after the cables were put back we were able to restripe to recover redundancy.

We deployed 4 to different customers, plus our own unit in house. All but 1 have had catastrophic failures of one type or another. Working with their support, two had software errors where the only recourse was to evacuate the SAN and recreate the vdisk (or on one we could just ignore multiple disk failure notifications every time a scrub ran, after replacing half of the array that got old). One had a firmware update (1 revision difference) corrupt all data on all vdisks. Another would see a single disk failure in a RAID 5 as a reason to drop the entire array out, twice. One averages a disk failure a month. I can not see us ever getting another one.

Honestly all of the P2000 major failures I have seen they have been attributed to a couple things...

1. Old Drive\Controller Firmware - Release 1 FW had some interesting things2. Folks ignoring drive failures or had no hot spares3. Using RAID 5 with SATA and MDL SAS drives or worse using it for production data.

In fact numbers 2 and 3 are the only times I have seen data get corrupted and had to pray to get to their data (setting a vdisk to trust to evacuate the volume). Did have a couple of tense firmware upgrades of course they were running LAUNCH firmware...

Did have a couple flaky drives run amok on a SAS backplane... didn't take the unit down but would exhibit some ugly errors, also had some fun where I plugged up a shelf wrong and would cause controllers to crash but that was my fault. (I actually think it was MSA2K from what I remember)

3 P2000's in production, 1 in dev which I use mainly to test firmware upgrades under IO pressure. Apart of deliberate attempts to break them during initial deployment/soak testing, they've been smooth sailing for ~2 years now.

We have a Drobo Elite in production, it was the first 8-bay, dual (yet completely independant), iSCSI only model. I think its been almost 3 years now. We purchased it for inexpensive, yet online VM and video file archiving.

Initially it was sketchy. We were able to lock it up under load, particularly from vSphere - despite being 'certified'. Later firmware fixed this however and since then its been 100% solid. A year in we swapped half the drives for larger, and now we are about to do it again. Should have in the neighborhood of 12T of dual disk redundant storage.

All that being said, it is very slow, a Windows direct iSCSI session will max at about 30MB/s throughput and our testing in vMware shows about half that. The RE series drives we use in the Drobo are twice that fast directly connected to a windows host.

But, also, I don't have much to compare it too. Our main SAN is SAS P4000 (1Gb), and its wayyyyy faster. I am looking at Synology for some better 2nd tier storage and maybe a small unit for home, but I don't have any direct experience yet.

Dealt with a couple of these last year as part of HP's DataProtect infrastructure, and quite frankly they might be the worst storage units I've ever used.

Besides unreliable and slow and lousy thermal protection, one unit consistently 'tossed' drives for no reason. Of course, we always blame the drives......

Ours as I recall were RAID 6, and this still didn't prevent data corruption and parity rot that took two months to work through. During some AC maintenance in our offsite data center the replica unit went into fault mode. Granted the room got a bit warmer than normal, but nothing extraordinary. None of the other gear reported problems while the HP screamed in protest, went offline, and insisted having a box fan pointed at it.

Quote:

1. Old Drive\Controller Firmware - Release 1 FWa had some interesting things2. Folks ignoring drive failures or had no hot spares3. Using RAID 5 with SATA and MDL SAS drives or worse using it for production data.

ROFL....Most aggravating was HP's tech support, which is funny you mention this because I've had more technically satisfying conversations ordering fast food. Even with constant firmware updates and babysitting and changing supposedly 'bad' drives the units never did work properly, and frankly I'm convinced HP's support had never been in a room with the actual units. I'm still getting alerts from HP on the devices, and I changed companies 6months ago. Oh yeah....the firmware bugs and fixes which prevented the units from handling CIFS/SMB properly we're too little too late.